Why haven’t you achieve your goal yet? Are you frustrated with your performance in your current job? Are you looking for ways to exceed your boss’s expectations? If your answer is yes, it has a lot to do with how you manage your day. To be precise, you may have not been very productive! You hour will determine your day, you days will determine your week and your weeks will determine month and so forth…
Imagine you have been behind the target month after month. This means your career promotion, bonuses and even your job at stake! You may want to consider a career shift, but if the core issues i.e how to manage your day productively still unresolved, your career shift may not be the answer.
There are many books on the topic of Productivity and my favorite three are ; 4 Discipline of Execution, High Performance Habits and 80/20 Principle.
These are the three formula for creating a very productive day; (1)Know Your Goals, (2)Plan your week and (3)Protect your Four-Elements
Know Your Goals
Micheal Hyatt in his great book ; Your Best Year Ever, support this idea. He said “ great results don’t just happen. You don’t usually drift to a destination you would have chosen. In stead, you have to be intentional, force yourself to get clear on what you want and why it’s important, and then pursue a plan of action that accomplishes your objectives”. Do you have a clear career goal? How much sales target you must achieve this month/ this quarter? How many prospects you have to reach per day? Have you write down your goals and placed them in place that you can see daily? Is the WHY of your goals compelling enough? Have you shared your goals with trusted friend as an accountability partner? What are the rewards of achieving the goals and also the consequences of missing it? What are the trends of your achievement?
Plan Your Week.
Almost all successful people that I read about use this strategy. They plan their week before the week start. Some of them do the weekly planning on Saturday morning, some on Saturday night. The time span range from 15 minutes to even more than 90 minutes. They find a suitable time for them without interruptions and plan their week. This planning include reviewing the goals, actions for next week and also win and lose of the previous week. Subject of Weekly Planning is one of the key topics in one of the great productivity books “ The 12 Week Year” by Brian P Moran and Michael Lennington.
Protect your Four-Elements
The four elements are physical, spiritual, emotional and mental. It means take care these four areas as your life depends on them. Eat right, exercise regularly, take supplement, rest well. Take care of your spiritual ; live with purpose and find the meaning in whatever you do. For emotional aspect, have a daily gratitude rituals; count the blessing you have regardless of how small it is. Focus on what is right and looking for solutions. Fill up your mind with positive stuff and remember; motivations and inspirations are a daily thing and not once in a blue moon. For the mental portion, keep learning. Invest 15 minutes everyday to learn ; youtube, podcast, ebooks, etc. This rituals will keep your mental sharp. I first learned about these four elements from Tony Schwartz who is the founder of TheEnergyProject. (www.TheEnergyProject.com).
Achieving a super productive day requires a great discipline. A discipline can be easy once you make the activities become your rituals. Rituals will stick if you start small and celebrate the wins.
Call For Action
Allocate 30 minutes of your time this weekend to do a weekly planning. Just 30 minutes and monitor the progress from there.
Sharing is Caring
If you find this article worth reading, please share it with friends….maybe some of them are struggling with productivity…and it is your small gesture that shows you CARE about them.